Hillary Clinton gave her first major economic policy address earlier this week and outlined her goals for lifting wages for the middle class, expanding social services, and addressing growing economic inequality. She said that an important ingredient to strong economic growth is women’s workforce participation, and promised to knock down many of the barriers that hold women—and our economy—back.

Hillary Clinton gave her first major economic policy address earlier this week and outlined her goals for lifting wages for the middle class, expanding social services, and addressing growing economic inequality. She said that an important ingredient to strong economic growth is women’s workforce participation, and promised to knock down many of the barriers that hold women—and our economy—back. But she failed to mention one issue that is critical to the economic wellbeing of women and their families: access to reproductive health care.

It was encouraging to hear Clinton acknowledge the important role that women play in the U.S. economy. After all, women’s entrance into the workforce in the 1970s and 1980s is credited with driving a fifth of GDP growth. But over the past 15 years, their participation in the labor market has declined from 60 to 57 percent, not a major decline but certainly a trend in the wrong direction. The U.S. now ranks 19th out of 24 advanced countries on this measure. America’s dismal status can be blamed in large part on the lack of generous and sensible work and family polices we see in other OECD countries. These include paid sick leave, paid family leave, and affordable child care. Another factor is the stubborn wage gap that disadvantages women—and particularly women of color—throughout their working lives and beyond. Clinton indicated that addressing these inequities is a primary focus of her economic agenda. Doing so would significantly improve the lives millions of women and their families.

But we must do all that and more. Without access to comprehensive, quality, and affordable health care, including the full spectrum of reproductive health care—maternal health care, family planning, and abortion care—women and their families will not be able to take full advantage of the economic opportunities available to them.

I’m not worried that Hillary isn’t going to be a strong supporter of reproductive rights. In her Roosevelt Island campaign launch, she called out Republicans who “shame and blame women, rather than respect our right to make our own reproductive health decisions.” Her campaign sharply criticized House Republicans for passing a 20-week abortion ban earlier this year, saying, "Politicians should not interfere with personal medical decisions, which should be left to a woman, her family and her faith, in consultation with her doctor or health care provider." Historically, she has been an advocate for reproductive rights in both domestic and international policy.

But it would be powerful if she could also articulate reproductive health as a critical component of economic security, as we at the Roosevelt Institute did in our recent blueprint for reversing economic inequality. Voters understand reproductive health as an economic issue. New polling from Virginia shows that 64 percent of voters there believe that a woman’s financial stability is dependent on her ability to control whether and when she has children, and 68 percent believe laws that make it harder to access abortion can have a negative impact on woman’s financial security. Polling conducted in New York and Pennsylvania showed similar results.

This isn’t just a matter of opinion; the evidence illustrates that reproductive health access has economic benefits for families. Studies have shown links between family planning access and greater educational and professional opportunities for women, as well as increased earnings over women’s lifetimes. Women report that using birth control has allowed them to better take care of themselves and their families, to stay in school, to support themselves financially, and to get or keep a job and pursue a career. And when women don’t have access to reproductive health care, they are economically disadvantaged. Take the results of the recent Turnaway Study, which has shown that women who seek but are denied an abortion are three times as likely as those who access the procedure to end up below the federal poverty line two years later.

In light of these findings, a progressive economic agenda will be incomplete if it does not include access to comprehensive reproductive health care. Lack of access to those services has significant health and economic costs. Women of color, immigrant women, and poor women all experience higher rates of chronic disease, unintended pregnancy, and lower life expectancy than women with higher incomes. U.S. women of color are 3–4 times more likely than white women to die of pregnancy-related causes, and infants born to those women are 2.4 times more likely than those born to white women to die in their first year of life. In some regions of the United States, the maternal mortality rate among Black women is comparable to that in some Sub-Saharan African countries. These disparities impact women’s quality of life. They inhibit these women’s ability to care for themselves and their families, to play an active role in their communities, and to participate in the workforce and achieve economic security. There is no more important time than now to advocate for a broader progressive agenda. Attacks on reproductive health access are at an all-time high and access to basic health services is being rolled back at a rapid rate.

The right and ability to make decisions about our bodies is a fundamental building block of our social and economic wellbeing. We can’t expect people to separate the physical, social, and economic demands and stresses they experience. Are women supposed to worry about their need for an abortion without worrying about the job they might lose if they take a day off to get one? Do they stress over needing to put food on the table for their kids without also worrying about how they will pay for birth control, student loans, and rent? No. For the vast majority of people in this country, life is messy and complicated and overwhelming, and everyday families have no choice but to juggle each of these issues simultaneously.

Progressives know that. Now is the time for them to put forth an economic agenda that will address all aspects of our economic wellbeing—not just those that have historically been politically palatable.

Andrea Flynn is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Follow her on Twitter at @dreaflynn.

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Next week marks the 5th anniversary of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Protection Act. While the law has made some solid strides toward regulating Wall Street (with the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau arguably the most potent and popular), there is still much work to be done, particularly in the realm of CEO pay reform.

Next week marks the 5th anniversary of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Protection Act. While the law has made some solid strides toward regulating Wall Street (with the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau arguably the most potent and popular), there is still much work to be done, particularly in the realm of CEO pay reform.

From 1978 to 2014, executive compensation at American firms rose 997 percent, compared with a sluggish 10.9 percent growth in worker compensation over the same period.

While CEO pay continues its determined ascent up a seemingly limitless mountain of stock options and other performance pay, the SEC has yet to implement all of the Dodd-Frank rules designed to reform CEO pay practices. The Say-on-Pay provision, which allows shareholders an advisory vote on proposed executive compensation packages, has been in effect since 2011, and Section 954—the clawbacks provision—should soon be finalized. But the SEC continues to delay the disclosure rule on CEO–worker pay gaps, as well as a few other key provisions.

This raises a few obvious questions: Why is it so important to urge the SEC to implement these CEO pay reform rules? Does it really matter how much CEOs are paid? Isn’t this debate really just about people being jealous of, for example, former Oracle chief Larry Ellison and his Hawaiian island?

Hardly. We have to stop talking about the CEO pay issue in terms of fairness, which usually leads to accusations of envy. This conversation just doesn’t get us very far. The truth is that skyrocketing CEO pay is terrible for our economy for two reasons, as we explain in the infographic below.

To elaborate, the problems are as follows:

1. How CEOs Are Paid

The current trend in how CEOs are paid, particularly with stock options, creates a range of economic problems. Several studies show that equity-heavy pay, because it makes executives very wealthy very quickly, distorts CEOs’ incentives, inducing them to take on too much risk. Instead of bearing this risk themselves, they shift it onto the rest of society, as we saw during the financial crisis. This model also encourages executives to behave fraudulently, as in the backdating scandals of a decade ago, and lessens their motivation to invest in their businesses. In addition, according to economist William Lazonick, in order to issue stock options to top executives while avoiding the dilution of their stock, corporations often divert funds to stock buybacks rather than spending on research and development, capital investment, increased wages, or new hiring. To top it all off, these pay packages cost taxpayers billions of dollars due to the performance pay tax loophole instituted by President Clinton.

2. How Much CEOs Are Paid

In addition to its problematic structure, the sheer volume of CEO pay creates an array of economic problems. A handful of high-profile economists—Thomas Piketty, Joseph Stiglitz, and Robert Reich, to name a few—have begun to make the case that a high degree of economic inequality precipitates financial instability because it leads to, for example, a decline in consumer demand, which has tremendous spillover effects in terms of investment, job creation, and tax revenue, not to mention social instability.

The growth of executive pay is a core driver of America’s rising economic inequality. According to the Economic Policy Institute, “[e]xecutives, and workers in finance, accounted for 58 percent of the expansion of income for the top 1 percent and 67 percent of the increase in income for the top 0.1 percent from 1979 to 2005.” Another calculation by economists Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon finds that the large increase in the share of the top .01 percent is mostly explained by the incomes of superstars and CEOs.

Dodd-Frank’s anniversary should remind us that we still have a long way to go to rein in ever-increasing CEO pay, including instituting key provisions like the CEO–worker pay gap. If we move the CEO pay debate beyond the rhetoric of fairness and envy to a conversation about its costs, we could galvanize the public around this issue. The evidence is clear: skyrocketing CEO pay is not just an ethical problem; it’s also simply bad economics.

Susan Holmberg is Director of Research and a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

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This week, the Roosevelt Institute's Next American Economy project is releasing a series of thought briefs in which experts examine how the economy will change over the next 25 years. Read the introduction here.

This week, the Roosevelt Institute's Next American Economy project is releasing a series of thought briefs in which experts examine how the economy will change over the next 25 years. Read the introduction here.

“Education should equip young people to shape an uncertain future so they can live more successful lives, on their own terms and together. They need the confidence and the capabilities to make their world together, in the face of tightening constraints on resources, rising aspirations, exploding opportunities for collaboration and pervasive institutional upheaval. They need an education that prepares them to be collaborative agents of change rather than atomised victims of change, to respond to frustration with creativity and innovation.”

—Leadbeater, C., Learning to Make a Difference: School as a Creative Community (2014)

The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacturing, and Commerce (RSA) proposes that we live in an unprecedented time of rapid social, political, and technological change, with increased access to the tools and networks that generate potential for many more people to realize their ideas and aspirations. This is our “Power to Create” approach. And yet, much of this creative opportunity is untapped, leading to a “creativity gap” where inequalities of wealth and skills and differing levels of confidence mean not all can access the resources required.

The stakes are high when it comes to tapping into this potential, as we face immense and complex global challenges that require innovative and collaborative solutions. At the RSA, we believe that public, professional, and political attitudes toward creativity need to be rethought in order to prioritize the development of creative capacities in schools and educational institutions. This is both an end in itself and an economic and social imperative if young people are to thrive and flourish in the 21st century.

As such, when approached by the Roosevelt Institute to identify, through an educational lens, the trends and challenges that will affect our economy in the next 25 years, we saw an opportunity to collaborate with a like-minded organisation on exploring the issue of closing the creativity gap. In contributing to the Roosevelt’s Next American Economy project, we were given the space to reflect on more long-term considerations of redesign and reform—something from which the education sector itself could benefit.

Our thought brief examines how school systems could be designed to maximize students’ creative capacities such that learning is geared more clearly toward equipping students to meet the demand for creativity. It presents the trends, challenges, and potential solutions to the problems faced by our current education system in this regard, arguing that there is an increasingly strong economic rationale for schools to prioritize fostering creative capacities to ensure a future creative workforce. We conclude by outlining 12 design principles with related case studies, intended for use by school leaders, teachers, and systems to inform policy ideas within their particular context.

Having avoided prescriptive policy recommendations, we aim to stimulate conversation and debate around our 12 principles on creative learners, creative educators, and creative institutions from which a vision of school systems that would best equip young people for the 21st century can be realized.

Joe Hallgarten is the RSA's Director of Creative Learning and Development. Roisin Ellison is Programme Coordinator for RSA Academies.

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This week, the Roosevelt Institute's Next American Economy project is releasing a series of thought briefs in which experts examine how the economy will change over the next 25 years. Read the introduction here.

Fifty years ago, the path to professional success and economic stability was pretty clear:

This week, the Roosevelt Institute's Next American Economy project is releasing a series of thought briefs in which experts examine how the economy will change over the next 25 years. Read the introduction here.

Fifty years ago, the path to professional success and economic stability was pretty clear:

Get good grades -> Go to college -> Find a well-paying job -> Climb the corporate ladder -> Retire

Today, this path is much more ambiguous. Many icons of modern-day success—Zuckerberg, Gates, Jobs—are college dropouts. In lieu of lifelong employment, young people are encouraged to develop “entrepreneurial skills” so that they can launch their own startups or, in other words, create their own jobs where there are none. But what will those jobs look like?

Recent technological breakthroughs in the fields of machine learning and robotics engineering have led to dramatic changes in the nature of work across many different sectors. Some researchers predict that over the next 20 years, 45 percent of jobs in the U.S. will be “computerized,” meaning that they will be broken down into automatable tasks that can be carried out by robots of one form or another.

Against this backdrop, it is no longer clear what skills, experiences, and knowledge are necessary in order to succeed in today’s rapidly evolving economy.

A few months ago, the Roosevelt Institute invited me to speculate on what the future of workforce development will look like in the coming decades, as technology continues to drive fundamental shifts in the nature of work in the U.S. economy. In my thought brief, I explore the following questions:

What skills and competencies should we focus on equipping the workforce with in order to meet the labor demands of the future economy?

Are university degrees dead? How will we demonstrate and package our competencies in order to find gainful employment in the future?

How will companies find skilled workers in the future? What institutions are needed in order to mediate fair relationships between potential employees and employers in the labor market?

In order to answer these questions, I outline a few specific trends currently underway in the arenas of workforce development, recruitment, and hiring. I examine the emergence of alternative higher education programs that seek to foster metacognitive competencies alongside the training of in-demand technical skills. In addition, I discuss the rise of online platforms like Khan Academy and Degreed, which could provide more customized educational experiences to a wide range of students. And finally, I touch on the opportunities and challenges that accompany the rise of recruitment methods that are driven by big data analysis.

These trends serve as an anchor for a much broader discussion on what the pathways to prosperity could look like in the rapidly changing U.S. economy. Although the future of workforce development remains highly ambiguous, my hope is that this thought brief can serve as a guide to thinking about the immense set of opportunities and risks that lie before us as we figure out how to prepare coming generations for the future of work.

Chelsea Barabas is the Senior Advisor for Social Impact at MIT Media Lab's Digital Currency Initiative.